All That Life Contains, Contained

Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964
The still life, above, from 1954 is on view in the artists
retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Credit
Giorgio Morandi, SIAE/Museo D’Arte Moderna E Contemporanea Di Trento E Rovereto

Aspirants to the role of painter-as-poet are many. Giorgio Morandi was the real thing. And the retrospective, “Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964),” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the second of its size in the United States, with nearly a hundred still lifes and a dozen landscapes, is something that anyone in love with painting and its very specific poetry will want to see.

Morandi’s still lifes are beautiful, but with a distinctive kind of beauty: subterranean, germinating, the beauty of roots, seeds, relics, of things lost, then recovered, and soon to be lost again. The show’s installation in the underground galleries of the Robert Lehman wing suits this beauty.

Despite their small size and plain components — bottles, jars, boxes, bowls, seashells — the paintings are emotionally audacious. This isn’t because of what they say outright about desire or fear, but because of what they don’t say; because they are so evidently shaped by self-restraint, and the passions that produced it.

Taken one by one, the paintings are close studies in rhythm and balance. When they are seen in series, intricate rhyme schemes surface as objects change shape, placement and chromatic tone from picture to picture while keeping their basic identity.

It is possible to think of all the still lifes in the Met show, which spans Morandi’s 50-year career, as stanzas of a single long poem, a kind of “Divine Comedy” of the tabletop, with epic but miniature heights and hells; a meditation on time, art, isolation, self-preservation and the ordinary mystery of all of that.

Morandi comes with his own personal mystery, or myth, depending on what you hear. There seem to be two stories, the first of which — the life of St. Giorgio the Hermit — is the more popular.

It is the tale of a deeply reclusive Italian artist who lives his whole life in a single apartment, from which he rarely goes far. Though he teaches printmaking in the local art school, he sees almost no one socially. He rarely travels, is unaware of public events around him, knows little of new art elsewhere. Despite scant recognition of his art, he doggedly paints away in a tiny at-home studio to the end of his days.

Then there is a second story. In this one a shy but cosmopolitan painter socializes regularly with fellow artists and keeps up, through books and magazines, with art developments in the larger world. He travels extensively within his homeland and is alert to events, political and otherwise, there. His work attracts an international following. Genuinely retiring by nature, he uses his reputation as a recluse to pick and choose his company and to reserve his energies for art.

Photo

A 1941 still life by Giorgio Morandi, oil on canvas, in the retrospective at the Met.Credit
Giorgio Morandi, SIAE/Musea Morandi, Bologna

Details from both stories dovetail in the life of the real Morandi. He was born in Bologna, in northern Italy, into bourgeois comfort. He studied art in the city and never moved from his family’s apartment, which he shared with three unmarried sisters. There he had a small bedroom, and adjoining it, an even smaller studio.

He taught drawing and printmaking for decades, first in elementary schools, then at the city’s art academy. He had many friends among Bolognese artists and intellectuals, who acknowledged and extolled his work. Like many artists in Italy before World War II, he had passive brushes with Fascist politics, though the degree of his commitment remains a matter of conjecture. What is not in doubt is his single-minded devotion to his work, and the path he traveled to develop it.

From his student years he knew and revered the art of Cézanne; the earliest paintings at the Met attest to this. From 1913 comes a Mont Sainte-Victoire-ish landscape done at his family’s summer home; and from two years later, a variation on Cézanne’s “Five Bathers,” but with nudes that look as boneless, slippery, and compressed as sardines packed in oil. Thereafter, apart from a few youthful self-portraits — two are in the show — Morandi avoided the human figure.

Yet he was looking at lots of figures, all the time. In 1910 he made his first trip to Florence and saw Giotto’s paintings, with their firm, blocklike, feet-on-the-ground bodies anchored in space. In Rome came another revelation: the fleshly miracles of Caravaggio. And at some point, somewhere, possibly in Urbino, he began a long relationship with the sun-bleached bodies and buildings of Piero della Francesca.

From all of these artists, Morandi learned something. From Giotto and Caravaggio he learned how to create weight in painting. From Piero he learned about light and its drama. From Cézanne he took two things. One was the idea of nature as personal artifice, something you observed but then made up. The other was a piece of cautionary advice: “The grandiose grows tiresome.”

Morandi is never grandiose, though he can be grand. And despite his repetition of themes, he is never wearing. I found myself waking up rather than winding down as I walked through the show.

He also included Corot and Chardin in this aesthetic start-up kit. And he took careful notice of his contemporaries. He checked out the Futurists. After meeting Carlo Carrà and Giorgio di Chirico, he briefly aligned himself with the movement or style called Pittura Metafisica, to which he contributed a few immaculately spacy still lifes.

But metaphysics, to the extent that it involved a belief or a program, was never of interest to him in art. And in the 1920s he moved on to painterly realism. The two self-portraits — virtually identical, expressionless, slightly hangdog — date from this time, as do landscapes dominated by houses with Piero-style light-washed walls.

And the production of still lifes began in earnest, the first of which were thickly brushed and densely populated tableaus. Filled to the edges with bristling forms — skinny bottles, pots with sticking-out handles — they are done in nougat beiges and chocolate browns, bread and earth colors, interrupted by patches of mineral-red and cobalt blue.

His repertory of studio props, salvaged from the family kitchen or bought secondhand, was more or less in place. It encompassed carafes of various sizes, jars, teapots, Ovaltine boxes and vases, with and without flowers. Some of these containers he customized, touched up with paint or covered with paper, to make them look generic, to call attention to their shape and mass.

Certain items came and went. Strange clocks were prominent for a while, then disappeared. In the early 1940s there was a sudden infusion of seashells. With their irregular shapes, spectral colors and dangerous-looking protrusions, they introduced a disturbing, aggressive organism into Morandi’s pictorial world. It is surely no coincidence that the shells appear in paintings done at a time in World War II when Bologna was being bombed.

But Morandi’s still lifes from all periods can be visually unsettled and psychologically fraught. In a series from 1941, arrangements of bottles and vases, painted in tones of white and light gray and arrayed processionally across the canvas, suggest the serene, if icy, facade of a Doric temple, but with columns so closely placed as to prevent admission.

Later, in the 1950s, objects grow fewer and smaller in scale and tend to be centrally placed in stretches of empty space, an effect a little reminiscent of abstract, “cosmic” Wagner productions of the time. In some cases we view the arrangements at eye level, but more often from slightly above. From this commanding God’s-eye perspective, the objects look slight, squat and vulnerable, like figures awkwardly pressing together for a snapshot, or huddling under a searchlight.

Although Morandi rejected the idea of abstraction in his art, that was the direction it was heading. The last oil-on-canvas still lifes are basically composed of blocks and cylinders — are these containers? what could they contain? — and snarled-up biomorphic forms merging into other forms. And in watercolor painting, which became his late preferred medium, solids become mere stains soaked into atmosphere.

By then, Morandi had achieved international fame, both for his paintings and for his extraordinary prints, which are too little sampled in the show, organized by the Met and the Museo d’Arte Moderna of Bologna, with Maria Cristina Bandera, director of the Roberto Longhi Foundation in Florence, and Renato Miracco, director of the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, as curators.

His hand had lost steadiness; his eyesight was, perhaps, failing. But he didn’t rest. He kept painting. Why?

You might ask other artist-poets this question: Joseph Albers, say, or Paul Klee or Agnes Martin or a New York artist I know who sits down at his apartment desk for two hours every day — only two, but always two — to embroider small squares of raw canvas with abstract patterns in silk thread. The work is close, slow and painstaking, done stitch by stitch, row by row — letter by letter, line by line — in calligraphic loops and tufts. An inch of embroidery, approximately the size of a sonnet quatrain, takes months to complete.

But the work goes on. Because it is controllable reality. It is a form of thinking that frees up thought. It is time-consuming, but time-slowing, isolating but self-fulfilling. It is a part of life, but also a metaphor for how life should be: with everything in place, every pattern clear, every rhyme exact, every goal near.

Correction: October 12, 2008

An art entry in the Week Ahead report on Sept. 14 and a review in the Weekend section on Sept. 19 attributed an erroneous distinction to the survey of Giorgio Morandi’s works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition is the second Morandi retrospective in the United States, not the first. (The Des Moines Art Center organized a Morandi survey that traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in 1981 before being shown in Iowa in 1982.)